Hungary Discontinues Gender Studies Programs: ‘Ideology, Not Science’

The Hungarian government is discontinuing programs in gender studies at state-run universities after determining the programs serve no identifiable purpose and are based on “ideology rather than science.”

Bence Rétvári, Secretary of State of the Ministry of Human Resources (EMMI), said that university degrees must be rooted in a scientific basis, whereas gender studies, “like Marxist-Leninism,” are more aptly termed ideology than science, and are inappropriate matter for university-level education.

A spokesman for the Hungarian government told Breitbart News that there is no demand for gender studies graduates in the Hungarian job market.

“There is no economic rationale for studies such as these,” he said, and nor does the program “furnish students with skills that can be readily and directly converted on the labour market.”

Few university students will be affected by the decision, since only 11 applicants were admitted this year into the gender studies program at ELTE, which has a cap of 18 students, and two more at George Soros’s CEU.

The spokesman said that programs with such low student numbers are unsustainable and “take away valuable resources from other programs, deteriorating the economic stability of universities.”

“State universities operated from public funds must take these factors into consideration,” he said, “since the purpose of these institutions of higher education is to meet genuine social and labour market needs.”

The government decree only affects two universities in Hungary, the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (ELTE) and the Central European University (CEU), the only two offering gender studies at the graduate level.

Officials have been eying gender studies with some suspicion for a while. In 2017, Lőrinc Nacsa, the leader of the Christian Democrat (KDNP) youth wing, said that gender studies at ELTE are a wasteful luxury and counterproductive.

“We must raise awareness to the fact that these programs are doing nothing to lift up our nation. In fact, they are destroying the values-centred mode of thinking that is still present in the countries of Central Europe,” Mr. Nacsa wrote in a letter to the president of ELTE.